Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

The Hobbit is going to be shown at 48fps in Theaters that can support it. Supposed to be cool/weird as fuck

Seems... unnecessary.

You can cut frames out of 24fps movies, and it's completely unnoticeable.

Than, you're wrong. There is a noticeable difference between 8 and 15 fps. It's noticeable as flicker, and it's noticeable in terms of how fluid motion the motion is. There is a huge difference between 8 and 24 fps. And the vast majority of people can notice the difference between 25 and 30 fps. Hell people used to NTSC can be given headaches from seeing the screen flicker of PAL.

@Inquisitor I think it was you that posted some videos earlier of melee multiplayer combat games that were in development... can you link me to those again? I'm wondering if people are developing their own engines, or whether they're licencing them and working from that point.

Can someone give me the rundown on why I shouldn't like Monte Cook and how his no longer contributing to D&D Fifth edition is a good thing?

He has an unshakable faith that you can balance elements in a game by making things weak/shitty now in comparison to being awesome later and vice versa. This has yet to work; in a social environment and over the timescale that RPGs are played (months if not years) it leads to people sitting around not being able to contribute to the game for the slim promise that they might be able to turn the tables and make everyone else useless later.

He also deliberately seeds designs with traps for the unwary - options that seem good but aren't. The theory is that this separates the l33t from the noobs. My feeling is that this is retarded and kind of hateful.

"Mastery Traps" make sense for a competitive game, like Magic: The Gathering, where a player is rewarded by defeating his tactically inferior opponent because he recognizes the metagame and the realities of what works and what doesn't versus theoretical improvements that look attractive to the uninitiated.

Applying that mindset to a co-operative game like Dungeons & Dragons is why Monte Cook needs a firm smack in the mouth.

Can someone give me the rundown on why I shouldn't like Monte Cook and how his no longer contributing to D&D Fifth edition is a good thing?

He has an unshakable faith that you can balance elements in a game by making things weak/shitty now in comparison to being awesome later and vice versa. This has yet to work; in a social environment and over the timescale that RPGs are played (months if not years) it leads to people sitting around not being able to contribute to the game for the slim promise that they might be able to turn the tables and make everyone else useless later.

He also deliberately seeds designs with traps for the unwary - options that seem good but aren't. The theory is that this separates the l33t from the noobs. My feeling is that this is retarded and kind of hateful.

I have read so many different numbers pulled out of people's asses in regards to FPS that the only thing I care about is if something looks good to me. FPS is tainted by hearsay and I will not hear or say anything about it! GOOD DAY.

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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod

the classic example, and one he admitted to, is the Toughness feat in D&D 3rd edition. The description says that this will make your guy harder to kill in combat. What it actually does is give you a trivial number of extra hit points (like, 5 extra hp every three or four levels, when you gain as many as 1-10 per level normally) that are vastly outclassed by other options - for instance, if you want to not die, you're always mathematically better off taking one of the options that raises your defense so you don't get hit in the first place.

But those options don't really come out and say what they do - they might be given innocuous names like "advanced shield proficiency" or something. To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers, and people who do that will have results that are mechanically better than people who don't. The guy who picks "toughness" is going to sit around getting hit a lot and dying and wondering why his little man isn't actually that tough. Which, since the game is ostensibly about playing a role rather than winning at math, seems unsportsmanlike.

Meaning that the non-magical, martial-type dudes like Fighters and Rogues increase in power linearly, with their numbers steadily going upwards at a set pace, while Wizards, Clerics, and other spellcasters might start out kind of assy but towards the high levels become gods.

He also deliberately seeds designs with traps for the unwary - options that seem good but aren't. The theory is that this separates the l33t from the noobs. My feeling is that this is retarded and kind of hateful.

If you have the book right there, and can discern what the consequences of a design shall be, then in what sense is it a trap?

The problem is that a system like 3.5 is so vast and complex that choosing options that would fall under this category of trap are harder to spot than not.

To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers

That's what any reasonable player does.

Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.

making stuff all look like its filmed on a 50 dollar camcorder is another

I rip movies from Blu-Ray and then play them on my HTPC using Windows Media Player Classic Home Cinema (even the acronym for this shit is long) on a 120Hz flatscreen. The neat thing is that the refresh rate automatically gets switched down or up to whatever it was natively. And because it's 120, it's always going to be a rate the panel can match. It's not a bad way to do it.

the classic example, and one he admitted to, is the Toughness feat in D&D 3rd edition. The description says that this will make your guy harder to kill in combat. What it actually does is give you a trivial number of extra hit points (like, 5 extra hp every three or four levels, when you gain as many as 1-10 per level normally) that are vastly outclassed by other options - for instance, if you want to not die, you're always mathematically better off taking one of the options that raises your defense so you don't get hit in the first place.

But those options don't really come out and say what they do - they might be given innocuous names like "advanced shield proficiency" or something. To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers, and people who do that will have results that are mechanically better than people who don't. The guy who picks "toughness" is going to sit around getting hit a lot and dying and wondering why his little man isn't actually that tough. Which, since the game is ostensibly about playing a role rather than winning at math, seems unsportsmanlike.

The truly maddening thing about toughness is that every goddamned 3e-based crpg offers it as a default choice for auto-leveling or "recommended feats" or whatever

It should also be pointed out that Monte Cook is a giant asshole. Obstensibly, 5th edition is supposed to be designed with a lot of input from the community and it seems kind of retarded to have a giant shitheel of a person liaising with the community in such a project.

To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers

That's what any reasonable player does.

Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.

A lot of people dont play games to do math and take the rules at face value so they can continue on to doing what they want to do which is make a cool character and role play.

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surrealitycheckthe search for the means to put an end to thingsan end to speech is what enables the discourse to continue ~ * ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) excelsior * ~Registered Userregular

you should be making choices primarily based on the semantic content of the trait, not its underlying mechanism - if the mechanism is overlying the semantics, then you are playing the mechanism not roleplaying the experience

this is a sliding scale thing, but in general if your players are always peeking under the hood to build themselves then it means your players cannot take your descriptions at their face value or understand them intuitively

So my wife just had to mercy-kill one of the cardinals in our yard (which she likes) because one of our neighbor's cats (which she hates) had snapped its neck but not killed it yet and was playing with it. Not really looking forward to going home and dealing with that.

the classic example, and one he admitted to, is the Toughness feat in D&D 3rd edition. The description says that this will make your guy harder to kill in combat. What it actually does is give you a trivial number of extra hit points (like, 5 extra hp every three or four levels, when you gain as many as 1-10 per level normally) that are vastly outclassed by other options - for instance, if you want to not die, you're always mathematically better off taking one of the options that raises your defense so you don't get hit in the first place.

But those options don't really come out and say what they do - they might be given innocuous names like "advanced shield proficiency" or something. To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers, and people who do that will have results that are mechanically better than people who don't. The guy who picks "toughness" is going to sit around getting hit a lot and dying and wondering why his little man isn't actually that tough. Which, since the game is ostensibly about playing a role rather than winning at math, seems unsportsmanlike.

the original version of Toughness in 3e was even worse than Jacob has stated, since it was literally just a flat, tiny HP bump when you first took the feat and then never any more later. They tried to fix that in 3.5, but yes Toughness is a perfect example of a "mastery trap".

Hilariously enough, 3.5 introduced quite a few of its own version of reverse Mastery Traps, which felt like they were designed to entice math nerds with spreadsheets who never get to fucking play the game with real people at an actual table.

"If I take this feat from this book, and this prestige class, combined with this item, if an enemy uses this spell on me I will have unlimited hit points"

Like, they'd be mathematically correct but no DM in his right mind would allow those sort of contrivances in a character in the first place and even if he did, the circumstances they'd need to excel at their mathematical excellence would be meaningless.

I remember reading a post on the WotC forums where a guy was SUPER pissed because he showed up to play a game with some dudes from college and he had this really amazing, optimized combat build... only to discover these guys enjoyed the dramatic aspects of D&D more and if any dice were rolled at all in most game sessions, it was for things like Diplomacy checks.

The issue, J, is in the importance of role-playing in the equation: why, in the interest of role-playing, would one have to take one perk over another due to mathematical superiority if it conflicts with their character? I struggled with this issue as well but after some thought realized the prime directive of RPGs - to enjoy a role outside the boundaries of our strict reality, that is, our operating reality that has asymmetric and measurably 'correct' outcomes.